Henry Wilcoxon - Later Life As Producer and TV Actor

Later Life As Producer and TV Actor

In the late 1940s, "several young actors and actresses came to Wilcoxon and wife Joan Woodbury and asked them to form a play-reading group", which began to take shape as 'the Wilcoxon Players' in 1951, when the two "transformed their living room into a stage." 'Guest star' performers sometimes appeared in the plays produced by the group, among them Larry Parks and Corinne Calvet, and soon the "Wilcoxon Group Players Annual Nativity Play" was being performed "at the Miles Playhouse in Santa Monica." The group was recognized by the American Cancer Society in 1956 with a Citation of Merit, awarded for donations received by attendees of the groups Easter productions.

Wilcoxon played a "small but important part" in DeMille's 1952 production The Greatest Show on Earth, on which film he also served as Associate Producer, helping steer the film towards its Academy Award for Best Picture, 1952. He also acted as associate producer on, and acted (as Pentaur, the pharaoh's captain of the guards) in DeMille's remake of his own The Ten Commandments (1956). Wilcoxon was sole producer on the 1958 film The Buccaneer, a remake of DeMille's 1938 effort, which DeMille only "supervised" (due to his declining health) while Anthony Quinn directed.

After DeMille died, Wilcoxon did "considerable work... in pre-production" on "a film based on the life of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement," which DeMille had left unrealized, and was also ultimately abandoned.

After a relatively inactive period "for the next three or four years," Wilcoxon had a "chance meeting with actor Charlton Heston and director Franklin Schaffner at Universal studios," a meeting which saw him appear in The War Lord (1965), for which he again "went on tour... visiting 21 cities to publicize the picture."

He was credited as co-producer on a "90-minute tribute to Cecil B. DeMille televised by NBC" entitled The World's Greatest Showman: The Legend of Cecil B. DeMille (1963), which production was hampered by the absence of "some of DeMille's best-remembered films of the 30s and 40s" when rights-holder MCA refused their use. At the opening of the DeMille Theatre in New York, he produced a "two-reel short," that in the estimation of critic Don Miller "was much better than this 90-minute tribute."

In the last two decades of his life, he worked sporadically and accepted minor acting roles in a number of television and film productions. He guest-starred in shows including Daniel Boone, Perry Mason, I Spy, It Takes a Thief, Wild Wild West, Gunsmoke, Cimarron Strip, Cagney & Lacey, The Big Valley, Private Benjamin and Marcus Welby, M. D., as well as in a smaller number of films, including a memorable turn as the golfer-turned-atheist Bishop Pickering in the 1980 comedy classic Caddyshack.

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6256 Hollywood Blvd. west of Argyle St., in front of the W Hollywood Hotel & Residences and the Metro Red Line Hollywood/Vine station, and across from the Pantages Theater.